I
used give a lecture on history and film which came to mind as I was reading
this book. It was the first book I have ever read knowing it would be made into a movie. Historians (myself included) quite often
become all bent out of shape over Hollywood interpretations of historical
events. Often with good reason. On the other hand, many historians don’t
have a firm grip on how filmmakers “work.” Everything I know about film and
history, I have learned from Robert Brent Toplin, John E. O’Connor and Robert A. Rosenstone.

Historians
write books and paint their stories and arguments with words. They can keep going until the publisher tells them to stop. In these lengthy books, historians
have the time to examine the background of an event, the event itself, and then
its aftermath. Historians can also investigate abstract historical events, like
the history of an idea (democracy) or struggle (emancipation). Monuments
Men which falls somewhere between a proper history book and a novel, is
over 400 pages. Filmmakers have at most 2 hours and 20 minutes.

Filmmakers
may have a STATEMENT to make, but they also need to entertain their audience. Unlike
the historian, they cannot present a movie about the causes of Great Depression
(which start in the 1920s and are numerous), but they can tell the story about
a person during the depression. So the first object of a filmmaker is to reduce
history to a story about a person or small group of people. Because filmmakers
tell stories there must be a beginning and an end. Of course, life and history aren’t like this. A movie might end with VE Day in May 1945; but in reality life
kept moving on to VJ Day and then the Cold War. To make their stories engaging to
the widest audience filmmakers take the past and make it more personal and more dramatic. They also simplify it by collapsing or combining historical
characters, condensing time, focusing on only a few moments of a crisis, and
leaving out “extraneous” details. They
also create the past visually, and this, I think, is the benefit of history on
film over history in a book.

Filmmakers
use traditional story telling methods to turn their chosen historical event into
a film. The two main ones are stories told in three acts (exposition,
complication, and resolution) and applying a genre (buddy, war, romance, etc.)
For the former, Toplin (I think) provides a simple example: of exposition - put
the man in the tree; complication - throw rocks at the man; resolution - man is
rescued from the tree. Genre, as best I
understand it, provides the rhetoric or framework for the story. Audiences expect and
anticipate different plots and results in a Romantic-Comedy then a Buddy Movie.

The
next time you watch an historical film, think about the different mediums of
historical books and historical film and consider whether the tools used by the
filmmakers were in a sense “true” to the past or not.